The Timeless Gifts of Hayek, von Mises, and Read

The Timeless Gifts of Hayek, von Mises, and Read

In 1944, as Europe was slipping gracelessly under the sea of socialism, two small life rafts of common sense, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Ludwig von Mises’ Bureaucracy, were published. The messages of both are must-reads today.

The authors were of the Austrian School of Economics noted for its study of economic man as he is, not as social and economic planners wished him to be (and often murder him when he is not). The Austrian school recognized that man’s inherent objective is to live and that his rational choices to achieve life are most successful under the least governmental burden. Under the whip of severe governmental interference, men become serfs directed in all aspects of their lives, often with little hope of even a subsistence existence for themselves and no real hope for a better life for their children.

In addition to taking away their right of acting in their own best interest, citizens are coerced into giving up truth. Hayek writes, “To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends. Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far a possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants.”

The Austrians also understood and articulated that under any centrally planned economy there was no way to rationally allocate resources, that is to calculate the true value of productive inputs: land, labor, and other resources of production--there was only a government official somewhere decreeing what was to be produced and by whom. As communist and deeply socialist nations eventually come to recognize this huge shortcoming of their system, they either loosen the reins of economic control (China) or fall into fifth-rate nations living on the handouts of other dictators not so far down the road of communist bankruptcy (think Cuba, first economically supported by USSR and today by Chavez of Venezuela).

The Road to Serfdom garnered much attention in the United States at the time it was published and is credited in some circles for saving us from ending up even more like Europe. The Road to Serfdom is experiencing renewed interest in the face of America’s relentless slide toward socialism under the Obama crusade. This year it has sold 70,000 copies as word spreads among a disaffected populace. Part of Serfdom‘s popularity in 1944 America was its condensation in Readers’ Digest. Its popularity today is based on the yearning for answers to the Obama administration’s destructive initiatives.

Ludwig von Mises’ (1881-1973) small book, Bureaucracy, is read mostly by students and economists, but his writing is easy to follow and has a message for us clearly paving “the road to freedom” that also leads to abundance for all of us.

Mises poses the question if production is not being planned and set in motion by government directive and carried out by a bureaucracy, how will it happen? Who will run it? Who will be “the boss?”

Mises answers in his introduction to Bureaucracy, “The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.”

Another gifted voice for the free market was Leonard E. Read (1898-1983). In 1958, Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE.org) wrote the booklet I, Pencil, My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read. It is the amazing story of a yellow #2 lead pencil. Yes, that amazing instrument (a typical pencil is good for about 45,000 words or a line 35 miles long...) you probably used learning to write.

I, Pencil provides a clear understanding of how the specialized knowledge and production of disparate workers across the globe from the digger of graphite clay to the manufacturer of yellow paint, each pursuing his own well-being, contribute to the construction of a pencil. Read traces the discoveries of substances (rubber, zinc, copper, graphite), the design of machines (mining equipment, paint mixers, sawmills), and the hundreds of other kinds of knowledge that combine without coercion under a free market to produce what we want at a price we can afford.

When we look around the globe at countries that have a command leadership, whether plain vanilla dictator as in North Korea, or dictatorship of the proletariat as in Cuba, or a theocratic dictatorship as in Iran, and look at our own government of czars and bureaucrats appointed with no check from elected representatives, we are provided with evidence that it can and is happening here and now. Every time we give over any power regarding our personal decisions, over what is the truth, over what our children are taught in school, over our agreements and contracts, over what we eat, over who we see as a danger, over how much government is too much government, we fall into the muck of an “uncivilization” that will be run by a bureaucracy of non-elected, non-responsive men. Men who will paint the road signs to our new state of being...serfdom.

Oh, and you won’t need that pencil because it might be used to foment revolution...


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I, Pencil is available free to download at the www.FEE.org website. Read it with your children. You will also find a huge library on line of valuable insight in FEE’s other publications and jargon-free lectures. FEE is located in Irvington-On-Hudson and has regular lectures by world-renown freedom-loving authors and teachers. Founded by Read in 1946, it really is the foundation for economic education for a free nation.